The Great Fortress | Page 3

winked at anything that would enrich them quickly, while the New Englanders pushed in eagerly wherever a profit could be made by any means at all. Louisbourg was intended to be the general rendezvous of the transatlantic French fishing vessels; a great port of call between France, Canada, and the French West Indies; and a harbour of refuge in peace and war. But the New England shipping was doing the best trade at Louisbourg, and doing it in double contraband, within five years of the foundation. Cod caught by Frenchmen from Louisbourg itself, French wines and brandy brought out from France, tobacco and sugar brought north from the French West Indies, all offered excellent chances to enterprising Yankees, who came in with foodstuffs and building materials of their own. One vessel sailed for New York with a cargo of claret and brandy that netted her owners a profit of a hundred per cent, even after paying the usual charges demanded by the French custom-house officials for what really was a smuggler's licence.
Fishing, smuggling, and theft were the three great industries of Louisbourg. The traders shared the profits of the smuggling. But the intendant and his officials kept most of the choice thieving for themselves.
The genuine settlers--and a starveling crew they were--wrested their debt-laden livelihood from the local fishing. This was by no means bad in itself. But, like other fishermen before and since, they were in perpetual bondage to the traders, who took good care not to let accounts get evened up. A happier class of fishermen made up the engages, who were paid by government to 'play settler' for a term of years, during which they helped to swell the official census of uncongenial Louisbourg. The regular French fishing fleet of course returned to France at the end of every season, and thus enjoyed a full spell of French delights on shore.
The Acadians supplied Louisbourg with meat and vegetables. These were brought in by sea; for there were no roads worth mentioning; nor, in the contemporary state of Cape Breton, was there any need for roads. The farmers were few, widely scattered, and mostly very poor. The only prosperous settlement within a long day's march was situated on the beautiful Mira river. James Gibson, a Boston merchant and militiaman, who served against Louisbourg in 1745, was much taken by the appearance of an establishment 'at the mouth of a large salmon fishery,' by one 'very handsome house, with two large barns, two large gardens, and fine fields of corn,' and by another with 'six rooms on a floor and well furnished.' He adds that 'in one of the barns were fifteen loads of hay, and room sufficient for sixty horses and cattle.' In 1753 the intendant sent home a report about a proposed 'German' settlement near the 'Grand Lake of Mira.' A new experiment was then being tried, the importation of settlers from Alsace-Lorraine. But five years afterwards Cape Breton had been lost to France for ever.
The fact is that the French never really colonized Cape Breton at large, and Louisbourg least of all. They knew the magnificent possibilities of Sydney harbour, but its mere extent prevented their attempting to make use of it. They saw that the whole island was a maritime paradise, with seaports in its very heart as well as round its shores. But they were a race of gallant, industrious landsmen at home, with neither the wish nor the aptitude for a nautical life abroad. They could not have failed to see that there was plenty of timber in some parts of the island, and that the soil was fit to bear good crops of grain in others. A little prospecting would also have shown them iron, coal, and gypsum. But their official parasites did not want to see smuggling and peculation replaced by industry and trade. Nothing, indeed, better proves how little they thought of making Ile Royale a genuine colony than their utter failure to exploit any one of its teeming natural resources in forest, field, or mine.
What the French did with extraneous resources and artificial aids in the town of Louisbourg is more to the purpose in hand. The problem of their position, and of its strength and weakness in the coming clash of arms, depended on six naval, military, and governmental factors, each one of which must be considered before the whole can be appreciated. These six factors were--the government, the garrison, the militia, the Indians, the navy, and the fortress.
Get rich and go home. The English-speaking peoples, whose ancestors once went to England as oversea emigrants, and two-thirds of whom are now themselves the scions of successive migrations across the Seven Seas, cannot understand how intensely the general run of French officials detested colonial service, especially in a place like